Training
Which Course is Right for Me?
Manager

Which Course is Right for Me?

Managers

Analysts

Architects

Coaches

Database Admins

Designers

Managers

Product Managers

Product Owners

Programmers

Project Managers

ScrumMasters

Team Leads

Team Members

Testers

Functional managers are responsibile for developing people in their groups. Even though ScrumMasters and product owners provide guidance and coaching, their views are limited to a single project or product. Securing the budget and time to send teams to conferences, challenging them with appropriate projects, and encouraging them to join or form communities of practice are all part of the functional manager’s role in an agile environment.

Core

Core courses are fundamental to your effective use of agile.

Certified ScrumMaster® or Working on a Scrum Team

These two courses cover the fundamental principles of Scrum. Both courses are suitable for all team members including Scrum Masters and product owners.

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Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®

Elevate your Scrum leadership with advanced facilitation and change skills that extend your impact beyond a single team.

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Accurate Agile Planning

Learn evidence-based planning techniques that replace false precision with realistic expectations.

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Optional

Optional courses are less specific to this particular role, but will still provide value.

Certified Scrum Product Owner®

Learn to manage a healthy backlog, make better tradeoffs, and gain stakeholder buy-in around what matters most.

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Certified ScrumMaster® or Working on a Scrum Team

Description:

These two courses cover the fundamental principles of Scrum. Both courses are suitable for all team members including Scrum Masters and product owners.

Certified ScrumMaster®

A two-day class taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers, the Certified ScrumMaster course covers the fundamental principles of Scrum as well as detail about the different roles, meetings, and artifacts. Despite the name, it's perfect for anyone who wants to understand Scrum, not only ScrumMasters.

Working on a Scrum Team

Based on the content of our popular Certified ScrumMaster course, Working on a Scrum Team differs by being entirely configurable. Prior to the course, you will work with one of our instructors to identify the most important course content. If, for example, you want more time spent on estimating and less on the daily scrum, you can easily make this the course for you.

Certified ScrumMaster or Working on a Scrum Team

Topics:

Scrum Overview

Agile
Scrum

Sprinting

Timeboxes
No Changes Allowed
Reciprocal Commitments
Defining Done
Sprint Types
Introducing Change into a Sprint

The Development Team

Rights & Responsibilities
Self-Organizing
Cross-Functional
Collaborating
Component and Feature Teams

The Product Owner

What is a Product Owner?
Rights & Responsibilities
Managing Stakeholders

The Scrum Master

The Scrum Master
Rights & Responsibilities
Four Facilitation Techniques
Coaching, Mentoring, Teaching & Facilitating
The Scrum Master in Dual Roles
Servant Leadership

Managers

Project Managers
Functional (Department) Managers

Product Backlog

Responsibilities & Attributes
User & Job Stories
Two Ways of Adding Detail
Progressive Refinement
Organizing the Backlog
Story Splitting

Planning

Fixed-Date Plans
Fixed-Scope Plans
Creating the Plan
Technical Debt

Estimating

Relative Estimating
Story Points
Ideal Time
Affinity Estimation
Three Ways to Estimate Velocity

Sprint Planning

Meeting Responsibilities
The Sprint Goal
The Purpose
Capacity-Driven Sprint Planning
Velocity-Driven Sprint Planning
Decomposing Stories into Tasks
Working Out of Order
What To Do When the Product Owner Is Missing

Other Scrum Meetings

Daily Scrum
Sprint Review
Sprint Retrospective
Product Backlog Refinement

Scaling Scrum

Scaling Guidelines
Scaling the Planning Meeting
Scrum of Scrums
Communities of Practice

Advanced Certified ScrumMaster®

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Description:

In this two-day course you'll dive deep into the advanced skills you need to be a valuable Scrum Master including coaching, facilitation, and the day-to-day techniques that build strong teams. This goes beyond foundational learning and gives you much more nuanced skills that you’ll come to rely on in real life.

It includes pre-workshop video lessons to complete before the live class. You'll then have two days of live, online lessons and group discussions as well as breakout group exercises and individual exercises. You will be expected to participate in all exercises, as well as be prepared to do research and present your thoughts and findings to the class.

With this course you can

Use advanced facilitation skills to improve communication between the team, product owner, and stakeholders
Overcome resistance and skepticism with practical coaching techniques
Motivate a team so that members actually want to achieve goals together
Stand out from other Scrum Masters and showcase your value as a specialist.

Course Prerequisites

Hold a CSM designation with the Scrum Alliance (your certification does not need to be active at the time you take the A-CSM course)
Demonstrate 12 months of work experience as a Scrum Master within the last five years

Topics:

Agile and Scrum

Go beyond the rules of Scrum to understand the principles that make agile work. Explore how Scrum fits alongside other agile approaches and what must be preserved when teams adapt practices to real-world constraints.

The Scrum Master Role

Clarify what it truly means to be an effective Scrum Master. Examine the behaviors, responsibilities, and boundaries of the role—and how great Scrum Masters build trust, influence outcomes, and avoid becoming process police.

Facilitation

Learn advanced facilitation techniques for challenging situations. Practice guiding discussions when there is disagreement, ambiguity, or strong emotion, helping groups reach clarity and decisions without forcing consensus.

Coaching

Develop coaching skills that help teams grow rather than depend on you. Learn when and how to coach individuals and teams, how to work through resistance, and how to choose the most effective stance in the moment.

High-Performing Teams

Explore what enables teams to move from working to truly high-performing. Examine collaboration, quality, and delivery patterns, and how Scrum Masters can support Product Owners and teams through discovery, refinement, and continuous improvement.

Agile Organizations

Understand how organizational systems affect team performance. Examine common structural impediments, apply systems thinking and root-cause analysis, and learn how Scrum Masters can influence change beyond a single team.

Scrum Mastery

Bring the learning together with a focus on your own development. Assess your strengths and growth areas and leave with a clearer path for becoming a more effective, influential Scrum Master.

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Accurate Agile Planning

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Description:

This course is for anyone who needs to answer the question:

“How much can be delivered… by when?”

If you’re working on contract-development or high-visibility projects, it’s critical to tell bosses, clients, and customers what can be delivered—and when.

But this isn’t easy when:

Stakeholders often have unrealistic expectations (and don’t believe you when you say something isn’t possible)
Teams get confused by story points and struggle to estimate accurately and quickly
It’s not easy to plan for what you don’t know - some requirements may be hidden at the point of planning

This course shows you how to solve those problems.

You’ll learn proven estimating approaches in an easy-to-understand way so you can:

Guide any team to estimate quickly and accurately
Tackle risk and uncertainty upfront - and plan accordingly
Communicate plans with confidence - answering questions and managing expectations

In just one day you can create accurate, agile plans for fixed scope, fixed date, and fixed everything projects.

This course is ideal for agile leaders at the team or group level including:

Technical leads
Team leads
Scrum Masters
Product owners
Product managers
Agile coaches

The course is intermediate. If you’re new to agile, you can still benefit from this course as long as you are familiar with iterations, product backlogs, velocity, and backlog items such as user stories.

Read the Course Outline below for more details.

Topics:

What Is Agile Planning?

Good Plans Lead to the Right Decisions
Why Estimating in Person-Days Does Not Work

Estimating with Story Points

What Story Points Are
Using an Appropriate Scale
Five Types of Estimates and Which Works
Planning Poker and Affinity Estimating

Milestone (Release) Planning

Fixed-Date Plans
Fixed-Scope Plans
Fixed-Everything Plans
Estimating Velocity
Estimating Velocity Without Data (or Even a Team)

Planning for What You Don’t Know

Why Your Product Backlog Is Bigger than You Think
Estimating the Unknown Backlog

Buffering Critical Plans

Don’t Pad a Plan but Buffer What Matters
Why Two Estimates Are Better (and Faster) than One
Measuring Risk
Creating the Buffered Plan

Getting Faster and Better at Estimating

Seven Things to Do to Get Better, Faster Estimates
Four Things to Stop Doing

Communicating about Estimates and Plans

Explaining Story Points
Explaining What Makes a Good Estimate or Plan
Answering Questions about the Plan

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Better User Stories

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Description:

A great product begins with a great product backlog. User stories are by far the most common way of writing product backlog items, used by an increasing number of agile teams.

This course will help participants learn solutions to some of the most common problems with user stories and product backlogs. You will finish the course with known, proven techniques to overcome your current challenges, from spending too much time splitting stories to adding too much detail to managing the need for a requirements document.

During the course, participants will work on product ideas or features you provide. Or they can work on ones we’ve designed to maximize shared learning and bring out the subtle challenges teams can face. During the course, participants can also identify new products to work on throughout the day. This flexibility ensures they are always working on relevant ideas.

Participants will practice conducting a story-writing workshop and will learn how to create a story map to improve communication with stakeholders and to uncover user needs earlier—so last-minute requirements don’t derail a project.

The Better User Stories course goes beyond user stories to give participants practice writing job stories and technical stories, two exciting approaches that can immediately improve a team’s backlog-writing skills.

Knowing how much detail to include (and how early to add it) is a vital skill for agile team members to develop. Adding too much detail too early wastes precious time that could be used on higher priority features. Adding too little detail or adding it too late can jeopardize delivery. Through this course, participants learn simple questions to ask that will get them the right amount of detail every time.

Participants will learn how to split stories so that each can fit within an iteration. Our SPIDR story-splitting framework, taught in this class, will give participants a reliable, repeatable way to split any story.

After taking this course, teams will spend more time building features that deliver the most value to stakeholders each iteration.

Topics:

What Stories Are

Introduction
Some Sample User Stories
Card, Conversation, Confirmation
Is a Template for Use Really Necessary Really Necessary
Detail Is Deliberately Deferred
Stories Are Pointers to Requirements
How Stories Differ from ‘System Shall’ Statements
How Stories Differ from Use Cases

Users, User Roles and Personas

Introduction to User Roles and Personas
User Rules – Context, Characteristics, and Criteria
How to Do User Role Model
Creating Personas for High-Consideration Products
Attributes to Consider When Creating a Persona
Documenting a Persona
Systems and Developers as Users
Decorated User Rolls
Writing User Stories for the Right User

Story Mapping and Story-Writing Workshops

Introduction to Story-Writing Workshops and Story Mapping
The Four Times to Write Stories
The Significant Objective Focuses the Scope of a Story-Writing Workshop
Story-Writing Workshop, Attendees, Duration, and Preparation
The Story-Writing Workshop Agenda
Story Mapping
Going Deeper with Story Mapping
Making Decisions with a Story Map
Organizing Stories with a Goal Story Hierarchy or a Mind Map

Adding Detail with Conditions of Satisfaction or Acceptance Criteria

Introduction to Adding Detail
Progressive Refinement – Adding Detail Over Time
Epics and Themes – Some Clear, Useful Definitions and Examples.
Two Ways of Adding Detail to a Story
Why I Prefer Conditions of Satisfaction Rather than Acceptance Criteria
How Much Detail Is Appropriate
Working with the Team That Wants Too Much Detail
Definition of Ready and Why Having One Could Be Dangerous

INVEST in Good Stories

Introduction to INVESTing in Good Stories
Independent
Negotiable
Luggable
Estimated
Small or Sized Appropriately
Testable

Splitting Stories

The Introduction to Complex and Compound Stories
The SPIDR Approach to Splitting Stories
S – Splitting Stories with Spikes
P – Splitting Stories Along Paths
I – Splitting Stories by Interfaces
D – Splitting Stories by Data
R – Splitting Stories by Rules
Tracer Bullets
Closed Stories
Three Things to Do When You Can't Split a Story

Overcoming Common Problems

Introduction to Overcoming Common Problems
Managing Dependencies Between Stories
Stories with Too Much Detail
Spending Too Much Time Splitting Stories
Stories Involving More than One Team
Stories That Are Really Tasks
Managing the Need for a Requirement Document

Things That Are Not User Stories

Introduction to Not Everything Needs to Be a User Story
Nonfunctional Require Requirements
Stories and Bugs
Features from Future–Driven Development
Job Stories
Looking Further at Job Stories

Wrap Up

Remembering the Purpose of User Stories

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Certified Scrum Product Owner®

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Description:

Taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers, this two-day course is appropriate for new product owners, aspiring product owners, and analysts. Here, we fully equip participants with the knowledge and skills they need to excel.

The course begins with a Scrum overview, introducing the roles of a Scrum team and how products are developed using sprints.

Participants learn the responsibilities, characteristics, and different environments in which a product owner may work. They will practice five techniques for creating and communicating a clear, elevating goal that promotes team commitment and focus.

The product backlog is a central component of every product owner’s work. So they are equipped to write product backlog items for any product, course participants gain experience with user, job, and technical stories. We also cover story mapping, which can help engage stakeholders so that user needs are discovered early—avoiding the late surprises that can derail projects.

Product owners will go beyond knowing what to build, into ensuring features are developed in the optimal order, using the multiple prioritization techniques they’ll practice in this course.

Participants will learn how to produce accurate fixed-date and fixed-scope plans, enabling better decision-making throughout the organization.

Following the successful completion of this course, each participant will become a Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Product Owner.

Topics:

Scrum Overview

Agile
Scrum

The Product Owner

What Is a Product Owner?
Characteristics
Responsibilities
Product Owners in Different Contexts
Quarterly Activities
Involvement over Time
Asking for Clarifications, Not Changes
Dealing with Difficult Situations
Business Analysts & Product Managers
Scaling the Product Owner Role

Visioning

Specifying the Problem, Not the Solution
Creating a Concise Vision
Five Techniques for Communicating Vision

Customers and Users

Validating Assumptions
User Roles
User Role Modeling
Personas
Roles vs. Personas
Decorated Roles & Extreme Characters

The Product Backlog

What Is a Product Backlog?
Progressive Elaboration
Product Backlog Refinement
User Stories
Adding Detail to User Stories
Job Stories
Technical Stories
Themes & Epics
Splitting Stories with the SPIDR Approach
Who Contributes Items?
Story Writing Workshop
Story Mapping

Prioritizing

Key Concepts in Prioritization
Factors in Prioritization
Formal Approaches
What Different Stakeholders Value
Collaborative Prioritization Techniques

Planning

Accuracy and Precision
Velocity
Using a Velocity Range
Fixed-Date Plans
Fixed-Scope Plans

The Scrum Master

Responsibilities
Description of Role

Developers

Responsibilities
Component and Feature Teams

The agenda for this course has been carefully defined to comply with Scrum Alliance learning objectives required for certification, so sections cannot be removed or shortened. For a configurable version of this course, consider the Effective Product Owner course.

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Community

Tools & Tips

Resources

Weekly Tips

About MGS

Our Team

Contact Us

Private Training

Which Course is Right for Me?

Managers

Analysts

Architects

Coaches

Database Admins

Designers

Managers

Product Managers

Product Owners

Programmers

Project Managers

ScrumMasters

Team Leads

Team Members

Testers